Darwin's continent cycle theory and its simulation by the Prisoner's Dilemma

Theoretical biology has largely ignored Darwin's true evolution model. In his famous book about the origin of species Darwin discusses detailed the importance of a population structure on evolution. He conjectures that a large continent which will exist for long periods in a broken condition, will be the most favourable for the production of many new forms of life. We have called this conjecture Darwin's continent cycle theory. In this paper we will investigate some of Darwin 's arguments in support of his theory by simulating an artificial ecology with the parallel genetic algorithm PGA. The artificial ecology consists of a population playing the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. The major emphasis of this paper is on the methodological questions of the simulation. These are the genetic representation, the mapping of the genotypes to phenotypes and the spatial population structure. Keywords Genetic algorithms, evolution, population structures, prisoner's dilemma 1 Introduction The most ..